Borgias' actor David Oakes's Desert Island Folk

I love Twitter. I looked at my phone one day to discover that I was being followed on there by someone who looked slightly familiar and had a dramatic looking profile pic.

David Oakes described himself on his blurb as an "actor who likes folk music". Turned out (a) the reason why he looked familiar was because he'd been in Trinity, a pretty weird and addictive TV show I borrowed from Love Film for reasons that elude me now. And (b) Oakes was starring in something big budget with Jeremy Irons called The Borgias that's been showing on Sky Atlantic and is now available on DVD. 

That's him, as Juan Borgia. 

My thinking was that there's a similarity of intention between folk music and costume drama, so if you like folk there's a strong chance you'll also enjoy a good historical swashbuckling shagathon like The Borgias - and vice versa? - and may be interested to hear there's a folky who's acting in one. 

So, I asked Oakes, 29, whether he'd be interested in doing a kind of online Desert Island Discs? He agreed and this is the result. He wrote it, I edited it. And then I discovered that he'd thoughtfully put the songs up on YouTube where I - and you - could find them easily.

Here's David...

"I grew up in Fordingbridge in the New Forest and went to a primary school there that had mandatory country dancing classes. There were only 14 of us in my year and more boys than girls, so there were some much-dreaded weeks when I had to wear a red bib instead of a green one, denoting that I was dancing the ladies' part... This set me up nicely for a career of wearing tights and also instilled a love of music that was accompanied by the musky smell of hay bales and barbecue smoke. Fordingbridge, by the way, is not all that far from the Larmer Tree Gardens, home of the festival. But I heard my first choice of folk tune for this blog in Salisbury.

* Huckleberries Island by The Huckleberries from the album Jigweed

God knows whether they do this for a living but it seemed for several years as if every time I walked around any city in the west of England  - Bath, Salisbury, you name it - I'd stumble across this lot. In front of them there'd be toddlers jumping up and down and pensioners swinging each other around. I loved them for their bluegrassy liveliness: there's nothing stoic or dour about them. And they're a perfect accompaniment for drinking farmhouse scrumpy. 

* Prickle-eye Bush by Bellowhead from their first EP EPonymous

Driving back into Salisbury one day following an indigestion-inducing pick-your-own raspberry experience, a friend of mine put on a CD of a band she'd just heard at a festival. It was my first taste of Bellowhead - an experience bettered only by seeing them live for the first time. I'd come across Spiers and Boden before but it was their new, big band that really caught my fancy. You see, my mother plays the French horn and as a kid my attempts at television-watching often took second place to her and her friends from the Salisbury Brass Ensemble, who'd proceed to blast through their repertoire in the front room with no small pomp. I've loved brass ever since: a folk group with a brass section could have been designed for me. Prickle-eye Bush plays out in my head across the Wiltshire fields we were driving through on the day I first heard the song. It makes me think of Hardy - Tess or Jude put in imaginary cameo appearances. I also really loved Jon Boden's Folk Song a Day podcasts - they're littered with gems. Outstanding.

* My Young Man by Kate Rusby from Little Lights

More brass. This is one of those perfect songs. I love Kate’s voice, it's so expressive. And the purity of the accompaniment by such a tight knit brass ensemble makes it a beautiful modern folk tale that brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it. Listening today, there's also a sorrow within the sound of colliery brass that speaks of the pain of the mine closures under Thatcher. I think that Kate’s tale of a woman and her love for a changed man links the personal to the political and also reminds me of my time at university in Manchester. I studied English there and became entranced by the music that came from the industrial heart of our country.

* Kit's Tune / When a Knight Won His War by Martin Simpson from Prodigal Son

A few years back, I went to a folk concert hosted by the BBC as part of the proms at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the first time I'd heard either Bella Hardy or Martin Simpson but I came to love both as a result. It proved to me that the tradition will not die - people will always sing great stories. Martin did When a Knight Won His Spurs that evening and though I knew the melody from singing it in church - my father is a C of E canon - in Martin’s hands it came vividly back to life. Now I listen to the song regularly; the themes of valour, honour and duty are something I often have to deal in the roles I play and, to be honest, I don’t think audiences really understand these themes anymore. The constancy of Catholic faith throughout Europe during the time of the Borgias, or the hardship of a peasant’s life, which was central to Pillars of the Earth.  We far too readily modernise what we see and water down what we imagine to be the truth. Drama can be grittier and much more fun if we present these alien historical landscapes as they really were. It’s hard enough filming in some 'period' locations - God knows how people managed to live in them. One day on Pillars of the Earth there was a huge rainstorm and we were wading through mud up to our knees!

* Uncle Lung by Sheelanagig from the album Uncle Lung

During my second and final year at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School we had the privilege of being the last to perform in the Bristol Old Vic theatre before it went dark for a refurbishment. One of the many excellent things about working there was the pub next door: The Old Duke had live music every night and it was here that I first heard, danced to, and sweated profusely alongside Sheelanagig. It was like discovering the Huckleberries again - but this time I was old enough legally to drink a pint of ale. We were doing an adaption of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and I only had one line. But I went on stage as a woman, a yokel, a beer seller, a morris dancer and a bailiff (and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten now). There were only 12 in a year at this drama school and only three women, so it was a return to my country dancing days. But I'll always have Sheelanagig. We poured out of the stage-door and into the Old Duke one particular evening, following the sound of one hell of a party kicking off: a little dancing can lift the soul. I also used their song Skotchne in a video we made at the time. 

* She Moved Through the Fair by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet from The Juliet Letters (You may need to download Spotify to listen to that, if you don't already have it.)

My love for Elvis Costello was planted in 2007 when I was preparing for the Sam Wanamaker festival at the Globe. I was half of a duologue from Twelfth Night and had to walk out on to the most awe-inspiring stage in the UK singing Come Away Death, which is in the play. Trying to find an appropriate melody, I discovered Elvis’s collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet and that it had included a rendition of the song. That said, we didn’t use their arrangement. And when I walked out I was so stunned by the sight of 1,700 people staring back at me that I sang it completely out of tune. But my performance that day, despite the bum beginning, began my professional career. I was asked to join Shakespeare’s Globe company that summer for Love’s Labours Lost and a new play, We the People. The soundtrack to my six weeks' rehearsals was The Juliet Letters.

* Imporsa by Lau vs. Adem from their EP Ghosts

At the moment I'm in Bruges shooting The White Queen for the BBC and those who follow me on Twitter may have noticed a rise in jazz recommendations. In London folk's a good antidote to the modernity that's all around. But Bruges is like a museum and arguably a little frustrating for it, so jazz balances out the tourist-centred cadences of the medieval city. It hosts a rather stunning annual jazz festival and I've found two good jazz clubs so far. In fact, my only folky experience here has been the musical taste of the proprietor of Books & Brunch on Garenmarkt. So Lau and The Imagined Village have stepped in. They've been vying for my Bruges airtime with Wynton Marsalis and John Coltrane.

I think that Lau's Race the Loser is a perfect modern folk album that respects the technology available on a laptop as greatly as it does a fiddle. It'll be a classic, I reckon. 

* The Washing Song by The Imagined Village from Bending the Dark

If I was allowed a ninth track on my desert island, it’d be Caw The Yows by Maz O’Connor from On Leaves or on Sand. Now I’m off to listen to some Justice - a French Electro Duo that have bog-all to do with folk music...

Thanks for reading this.

* Follow David Oakes on Twitter @David_Oakes

* If you enjoyed this you may also be interested in this about actor and folky Stephen Mangan.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

The Pogues: love the music, fear the lifestyle implications

The first word of James Fearnley's memoir about The Pogues, Here Comes Everybody, is "Shane". It opens with a band pow-wow in a cramped Japanese hotel room, at which it is decided to expel their front man for the colossal drunken ineptitude that led him to miss a flight to the US, where they were supporting Bob Dylan. If this sounds harsh, it should be said that it was only the most serious of many acts of unconscious - and I mean that in an often literal sense - psychological terrorism that would have completely broken the spirit of a group of less tightly bonded musicians.

For his part, Shane MacGowan - who is going under the nom de guerre "O'Hooligan" when we first meet him - arrives in the book of Fearnley's life apparently fully formed, already defined by a chronic alcohol dependence, his stunted brown teeth ill-concealed by a set of crowns. His response to the news of his expulsion, a wheezing "What took you so long?"

Fearnley, the Pogues' multi-instrumentalist accordian player, narrates his tale of substance abuse and the seething emotional condition of a band containing several highly volatile characters, with an even-ness that speaks of the very long time over which the book was written: apparently more than eighteen years. It has the quality of a well-worn pebble, something polished by time and the forces of life, and is none the worse for that in these days of instant online media. The story is structured in such a way that Fearnley, a Mancunian recently ex-public schoolboy at the outset, jets off into the west to live with his Californian princess - the actress daughter of a successful movie producer - as the credits roll, whereas years of alcoholic excess and life on the road must surely have made the transition to a new life a little more complicated than that. Yet there is an absence of ego at the heart of his writing that legitimises his version of events: a story has to begin and end somewhere, right?

It's certainly impossible to believe that someone who was drinking as heavily as Fearnley (below in 1988, further down today) says he was, could recall so much detail, for instance about the behaviour of individual band members - facial expressions, eye-contact - at gigs that, after a while of everyone standing in the same relation to each other on stage night after night, would have rolled seamlessly into one.

And yet there is so much colour dancing in his perfect prose, so much emotional accuracy about appallingly messy events and so much acute pain - emotional and physical - here that it's impossible to doubt the book's veracity in relation to the things that matter. Fearnley admits that, of necessity, it's partly fictionalised and MacGowan's quote on the back cover - "It's just how I imagine I'd remember it" - says it all really.

Among the many priceless set-pieces are an unflinching description of MacGowan urinating on a roadside, heedless of the usual niceties, another occasion on which his stock with the band was so low that repeated slurred demands for a cigarette yielded nothing more than a refusal by the others to betray each other by giving him anything, and the transition of Cait O'Riordan, The Pogues' only female member, from emotionally inept wild-child to beatnik Cleopatra opposite Elvis Costello's Antony. (Reader, she married him.) Her psychological footprint presses nearly as deeply as MacGowan's in the earlier chapters. There are also painful passages about Fearnley rooming with his gay band-mate Philip Chevron, who proceeded to fall in love with him, which are delicately and respectfully handled.

Witty turns of phrase combine neatly with their subject matter to become unforgettable. Of his early years in London Fearnley wrote: "Gigs, so far, had been ordeals of unrequitedness, a series of sporadic confrontations with an audience's neutrality." The Dubliners were "older men, hirsute, portly, moist of consonant"; whereas Bono's singing with U2 was "the grand incantation of phrases resembling advertising copy" (god I wish I'd written that).

From this rich palate bigger themes emerge: the dynamic of a band under threat from within, the recognition of and responsive roar by The Pogues' audience to their fierce Anglo-Irish underdoggedness, the tolerance required to manage extremity.

But lurking disturbingly at the centre of it all is the conundrum of the attractive-repulsive Shane MacGowan. As Fearnley writes: "More and more the question on people's lips was whether Shane wrote so beautifully because of the amount he drank, or despite it." There are clues, though nothing vastly illuminating, to what in his background leads him to value his health so little - how is it possible that he's still alive today? - or to have such a relentlessly negative world view. "I couldn't understand how anyone could let himself become so bereft of responsibility for anything and yet write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening pity for the human condition," writes Fearnley. MacGowan's family makes a brief appearance during a description of a gig in Ireland but are sketched mainly in terms of their clothes and we're told that his childhood "had sometimes been difficult" - though frankly whose wasn't?

I loved The Pogues as a teenager and I love them still, for the albums and for their terrifying, riotous live shows. I learnt more detail about the extremes of substance abuse reading Here Comes Everybody than I did during several years as a nurse, but am glad to have done so in such witty and erudite company.

James Fearnley is a brilliant writer, this book is a gem and I urge you to read it.

* Here Comes Everybody is published by Faber.

* If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in this, which is about the London Feis in Finsbury Park and includes a vivid description of a Shane McGowan performance.

* If you'd like posts from this blog to arrive in your Facebook news feed you could make it so by *liking* its Facebook page and then using the drop-down menu to indicate that this blog is one of your "interests". This will enhance the probability that you'll receive the notifications. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley